ABSTRACT
Factors impacting outcomes of proposals There is no doubt that all researchers feel passionate about their research and would like to be competitive in getting their ideas across. They would like to be able to get their articles published in highly ranked archival journals and transactions. They would yearn to write proposals that can stand against the criticisms of the toughest researchers in their elds of research. Yet the odds of winning an award, in the best of circumstances, are a mere fraction of all the proposals submitted to a funding agency. Proposals are rejected for a variety of reasons that include lack of funding, mismatch between the focus of the proposal and funding priorities, lack of potential for broader impact, little or no intellectual merit, infeasibility of the ideas, and limited potential for practical applications. These reasons are methodically used in the evaluations of proposals by nearly all agencies that fund scientic research projects around the globe. A less than perfect showing in any of these criteria will often be more than enough for a proposal to get declined. Still some researchers beat the odds and get their proposals funded more consistently than others. Clearly, there should be some art and possibly even some science behind writing proposals that makes such prolic researchers to succeed.
